Plural Ecologies in Conflict

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Guido Sprenger
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 282091244

Human-environment relations are among the most urgent fields of research in Southeast Asia. This network of anthropologists inquires, in six workshops spread over three years, how the heterogeneous theories and data on human-environment relations in the region can be synthesized, in regard to at once for practical use and in respect to a larger follow-up project. The transformations of these relationships are approached by six areas of friction:1. friction between local, scientific and state-channeled knowledge on the environment, also in regard to strategic ignorance;2. diverging pluralisms of law which enable differentiated access to resources;3. transformations of space and its use in urban and rural contexts;4. conflicting concepts of sustainability and environmental effects on local and global levels;5. frictions between concepts of the environment in local cosmologies and in globalized religions;6. the connections between changes in environmental and gender relationships.All these fields of friction contribute to the production of plural ecologies, which integrate diverse human and non-human beings in a differentiated and often contradictory manner.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks